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The fall out of Live Videos for social media

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CIOL The fall out of Live videos for social Media

Live Videos is the latest rage on social media platforms. Tech companies, especially Facebook, have been pouring big resources into the segment, giving users the ability to broadcast their lives in real time on Facebook and Twitter Inc.’s Periscope.

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Facebook, where users already watch more than 100 million hours of video daily in their news feeds, is betting that live videos will get people to come to its site more often and stay there longer, which would help it boost ad rates. Not just this, Zuckerberg led enterprise is paying partners to produce a live video. According to The Wall Street Journal,it has signed nearly 140 deals worth more than $50 million to media companies and video creators.

CIOL The fall out of Live videos for social Media

Live video, however, is uncharted territory for social-media sites. In the past year, there have been at least 18 violent acts—rapes, killings, suicides—disseminated on live video. This material can shine a light on events normally hidden from view, but also can shock or disturb viewers who have no way of knowing what is coming.

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Facebook had to deal with such scenario twice last week: by the Minnesota video (a woman live-streamed the bloodied body of her boyfriend after he was fatally shot by police during a traffic stop), which was reinstated more than an hour after being taken down, and the fatal shooting of Dallas police officers the following day, which was captured on Facebook Live by a witness. Facebook added a “graphic content” warning to both videos, which have generated 5.6 million views each.

“There doesn’t seem to be any limit to what can be captured and what can be shared,” says Albert Gidari, director of privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society. “There’s a lot of good that can come of that and a lot of bad.”

The discrepancies in dealing with such violent videos reflect the perils of rolling the service out without the technology or manpower to police it. Facebook said the Minnesota video was removed because of a “technical glitch,” which it didn’t explain. The video was reinstated after users complained that it showed an important news event.

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According to experts, the way social media sites censor content on their sites- relying mostly on users to flag objectionable posts, which are then screened by computer programs and human beings—isn’t always sophisticated enough for live video, experts say. They add that no software exists that can identify violence on streams without human intervention.

Facebook says it has a team working around the clock to review videos flagged by users. Twitter’s Periscope asks randomly selected viewers whether comments on live broadcasts that are flagged by others should be censored.

On Friday, Facebook acknowledged it hasn’t mastered monitoring live video. “Live video on Facebook is a new and growing format,” the company said in a post. “We’ve learned a lot over the past few months, and will continue to make improvements to this experience wherever we can.” One improvement has been its ability to interrupt a flagged live stream if it violates the company’s rules.

The biggest challenge with Live video is to tell if a video is going to run afoul of a site’s standards when it is unfolding in real time. To counter this, some of them have started to test a more proactive approach to handling such content. For the past few months,Facebook has been running an experiment in which it reviews publicly shared live broadcasts once they have reached a certain number of views or gone viral, even if there are no complaints. Twitter says Periscope is working on a tool to automatically monitor live-streamed video clips for offensive actions or harassment.

Live videos feature could have many more implications in the coming days, ones we can’t fathom presently but one thing is clear- Silicon Valley needs a more responsible and accountable approach before shipping out a product without dealing with its chunks.

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